Chris Fenton created a little marvel putting together some cool skills about 3D Printing, basic computing knowledge and a lot of creativity.
His Turbo Entabulator is made of (mostly) 3D-printed parts and performs basic computational tasks… mechanically: it’s something that teaches lot about how computation is being processed.
This is a (nearly entirely) 3D-printed, entirely mechanical computer. The machine has three single-digit, base-10 registers for memory, and is running a 4-instruction program that computes the fibonacci sequence. In the video, it starts out with the registers reading ‘1, 1, 0’, and computes the fibonacci sequence up to ‘8’ before overflowing.
This reminds me a lot a Charles Babbage-like engine: a single task-oriented (Fibonacci sequence, that is), mechanical and punch-card programmed calculator.
Chris describes his project in his blog, which took him some 50+ hours and around $100.
[Source: Chris Fenton]
